Nominal possession in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish: the role of animacy in the emergence of grammar (original) (raw)

The morphosemantics of Spanish indefinites

Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2016

I analyze the Spanish indefinites algún and algunos as a paucal and a greater paucal determiner, respectively, contrary to the common assumption that views the former as singular and the latter as plural. I use Harbour’s (2014) feature [±additive], and the possibility of repeating that feature, in order to do so. I propose a transparent word-internal compositional analysis of the two determiners, where alg- contributes [−additive] to both of them. I discuss consequences for the semantics of morphological plurality in nouns and for the analysis of ignorance implicatures.

The Noun Phrase in the Languages of South America

This dissertation presents the first cross-linguistic study of the Noun Phrase in the indigenous languages of South America. It builds upon a considerable amount of data that have recently become available for languages in this continent. Based on a sample of 55 languages, this study gives a novel account of the syntactic, morphosyntactic, and semantic properties of the NP. For example, the analysis shows that personal pronouns commonly receive the same possessive markers as nominal possessors, which implies that a fully grammaticalized category of possessive pronouns is rare in South American languages. In addition, the new South American data only partly confirm typological claims for tendencies in the NP domain. For instance, a morphologically distinct class of adjectives is found in many languages of the sample; however, this class is often small, and the dominant way to encode property concepts is with verbs. Finally, this study also includes a discussion of the geographic patterning of structural features in the NP, evaluating the assumption that there is a major typological split between so-called Andean and Amazonian languages. The analysis shows that most of the features cannot be attributed to either of these larger areas. It also demonstrates, however, that there is some evidence for a broad structural division of languages into the western part of the continent (corresponding to the Andean sphere) and the rest of the continent. One of the features that define this split is the parameter of alienability.

On the aspect of deverbal nominals: a corpus study of perception nominalizations in Spanish

Les nominalisations ont essentiellement été analysées d'un point de vue théorique, de sorte que des études de corpus élaborées sont difficiles à trouver. En outre, à l'exception d'un intérêt récent pour les substantifs psychologiques, la littérature s'est généralement concentrée sur les cas prototypiques, à savoir les nominalisations déverbales dérivées de verbes ayant un sujet agentif (comme construction, traduction). Cet article comble ces lacunes en étudiant le comportement aspectuel d'une catégorie négligée, les nominalisations de perception en espagnol (p.ex. vista, mirada, escucha). Afin de montrer que la complexité aspectuelle de ces nominalisations est comparable à l'hétérogénéité de la catégorie apparentée des verbes de perception, des données de corpus de nature différente seront utilisées.

On the development of binominal quantifiers in Spanish: the notion of lexical persistence revisited

CogniTextes, 2013

On the development of binominal quantifiers in Spanish: the notion of lexical persistence revisited https://cognitextes.revues.org/838#text 1/35 CogniTextes Revue de l'Association française de linguistique cognitive Volume 13 | 2015 : Conceptual persistence in grammaticalization phenomena in Spanish On the development of binominal quantifiers in Spanish: the notion of lexical persistence revisited https://cognitextes.revues.org/838#text 2/35 On the development of binominal quantifiers in Spanish: the notion of lexical persistence revisited https://cognitextes.revues.org/838#text 4/35

A Formal Approach to Spanish ‘Genitive’ Pronouns in Non-Nominal Domains

Languages, 2023

This paper examines the distribution of ‘genitive’ pronouns in non-nominal domains in Spanish. These pronouns can alternate with constructions headed by the item de ‘of’ and a pronoun or other Determiner Phrases (DPs). In general Spanish, this alternation between a synthetic (nuestro ‘our’) and an analytic (de nosotros ‘of us’) option is found in the nominal domain. However, when looking at variation, this alternation appears in adverbial, verbal, and adjectival domains too. We discuss this phenomenon from a neo-constructionist approach, which assumes the late insertion of phonological exponents. We propose that the analytic and the synthetic options have almost the same syntactic structure, the only difference being the nature of the nominalizer’s φ-features. When the nominalizer values its φ-features, it can be lexicalized alone, and the ‘genitive’ pronoun lexicalizes the rest of the structure, including the introducer p/Place. Otherwise, when the nominalizer cannot (or needs not to) value its features, a ‘non-genitive’ pronoun lexicalizes the pronominal structure, and the head p/Place is lexicalized by the item de. Our proposal explains the complementary distribution between agreement/nominal morphology and the item de observed in many Spanish constructions. Different consequences are advantageously deduced.

AnCora-Nom: A Spanish Lexicon of Deverbal Nominalizations

Procesamiento Del Lenguaje Natural, 2011

Resumen: En este artículo se describe un nuevo recurso: AnCora-Nom, un léxico de nominalizaciones deverbales del español. Actualmente, contiene 1.655 entradas léxicas y 3.094 sentidos, donde cada sentido tiene asociado el tipo denotativo y la estructura argumental con los papeles temáticos correspondientes. Este léxico se ha extraído automáticamente a partir de la información anotada en el corpus AnCora-Es. AnCora-Nom se derivó teniendo en cuenta no sólo la información estrictamente relacionada con las nominalizaciones deverbales sino también con información morfológica y sintáctico-semántica previamente anotada en el corpus.

The role of information structure in the instantiation of objects: Evidence from Amazonian Spanish

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2020

This study analyzes the instantiation of objects in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) discourse in two communities with distinct linguistic contexts. We examine the impact of two social variables (gender and place) and nine linguistic variables (transitivity, animacy, definiteness, anaphora function, anaphora expression, cataphora function, cataphora expression, activation, topic persistence) on the speech of eight participants. Our findings indicate that null instantiation in PAS is pervasive, occurring with a range of verb lexemes. While neither gender nor place are significant predictors of null objects, various linguistic variables contribute to the instantiation of objects. The five significant variables as determined by a mixed model regression analysis include the following: animacy, definiteness, anaphora expression, cataphora expression, and activation status. Several findings are consistent with previous research (e. g. human and definite referents disfavor null objects), while other results differ (e. g. PAS propositions disfavor null objects). Activation status and anaphora expression are the most significant predictors of null objects in PAS. In particular, highly accessible referents in discourse and anaphoric null objects favored null objects in subsequent clauses. Thus, the results in the present study demonstrate the pivotal role of information structure in object instantiation, furthering the discussion on syntax-discourse interplay phenomena.

The notion of inflection and the expression of nominal gender in Spanish

Studies in Language, 2013

The paper discusses the morphological status and the function of Spanish nominal endings-oand-a(ciel+o‘sky’ vs.caj+a‘box’); it is shown that both endings, plus the endings-eand-Ø, are inflectional suffixes that mark, however, not the values of an inflectional category (like nominal number or verbal tense), but the values of a feature of the syntactics of the noun — the nominal gender. The ‘nominal gender’ is defined as a cluster concept based on eight properties; it is a particular case of ‘agreement class’ opposed to ‘noun class.’ Some particularities of Spanish nominal gender are examined: its interaction with diminutive suffixes, gender conversion, and its “non-prototypical” character (a parallel is drawn between Spanish nominal genders and noun classes in Fula).